Today’s list of games pay homage to a simpler time in gaming: the 8-bit period, to be precise. Block Rogue distills the puzzle-solving elements of the original Legend of Zelda into an app filled with grid puzzles, Grimm is a side-scrolling platformer that feels a lot like Super Mario Bros. with a dark, Victorian art style, and Capcom Arcade actually lets you play old-school Capcom games. We’ve got all the details below.
Block Rogue (iPhone) $1.99
Remember the original Nintendo Entertainment System version of The Legend of Zelda? The top-down adventure game was as much about combat as it was moving through grid-based dungeons and solving puzzles by pushing crates. Block Rogue skips the combat and goes straight to the puzzles — 325 of them, to be exact.
Each room has you pushing blocks around a grid to activate a series of switches. Once you activate all the switches together, two doors at the top of the screen will open, allowing you to choose your path through the rest of the maze. You’ll hit 25 rooms on a single run through the maze, with the goal of finding 25 pages of a book to fill out the game’s story. It’ll take multiple attempts through the maze to get all the pages, but Block Rogue will randomize the puzzles to keep the game engaging, leaving you with plenty of rooms to solve.
Grimm (iPhone) $0.99
The dark and stylized art direction is the first thing you’ll notice about Grimm, a side-scrolling platformer that uses the iPhone’s accelerometer. A Victorian setting augments the creepiness of the story, in which you control a (possibly possessed) baby carriage on a mission to save the baby from a creepy Snidely Whiplash sort of character named Grimm, who seems bent on kidnapping him.
As you tilt your iPhone and tap to jump and dodge enemies, you’ll work through various levels both by quickly fleeing bad guys and by flinging the baby at the enemies to defeat them. You’ll also have to flip switches, jump obstacles and fight off birds to keep them from carrying off your infant charge. Grimm’s got an interesting style, plus 10 worlds and eight more small levels to work through.
Capcom Arcade update (iPhone, iPad) Free (with in-app purchases)
A freemium game that replicates an arcade filled with old-school games, Capcom Arcade lets you get a few plays of some classics for free, and even more if you’re willing to pay using in-app purchases. The app includes a roster of six different games, most of which have been available in arcades and also on 16-bit consoles like the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
The newest update to Capcom Arcade adds Ghosts n’ Goblins to the five other games previously available: Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II: Championship Edition, Ghouls n’ Ghosts, 1942 and Commando. Any of the games can be played with the three free “tickets” you receive each day when you load up the game, but you’ll have to purchase tokens (just like a real arcade) in able to use the games even more. It’s kind of a bummer, but at least Capcom Arcade puts lots of old favorites together in one place.
